Managing Accounts Receivable

In addition to performing work, invoicing customers, and collecting payments, you also have to keep track of who owes you how much (known as Accounts Receivable) and when the money is due. Sure, you can tack on finance charges to light a fire under your customers’

accounting departments, but such charges are rarely enough to make up for the time and effort you spend collecting overdue payments. Far more preferable are customers who pay on time without reminders, gentle or otherwise.

Because companies need money to keep things running, you’ll have to spend some time keeping track of your Accounts Receivable and the payments that come in. In this chapter, you’ll learn the ins and outs of tracking what customers owe, receiving payments from them, and dinging them if they don’t pay on time. You’ll get up to speed on Income Tracker, a handy dashboard that shows estimates you’ve created, how much customers owe—both overdue and not—and what’s been paid in the past 30 days.

In contrast to invoices, sales receipts are the simplest and most immediate sales forms in QuickBooks. When your customers pay in full at the time of the sale—at your retail store, for example—you can create a sales receipt so the customer has a record of the purchase and payment. At the same time, QuickBooks posts the money from the sale into your bank account (in QuickBooks, anyway) or the Undeposited Funds account. (Sales receipts work only when customers pay in full, because that type of sales form can’t handle previous customer payments and balances.) In this chapter, you’ll learn how to create sales receipts for one sale at a time and to summarize a day’s worth of merchandising.